New Orleans and Reconstruction

THE city had been founded in 1718. That is to say, the sanguine young Sieur de Bienville, bent upon realizing his dream of a great metropolis on the Lower Mississippi, had at last marked out a site on the narrow strip of land lying between the river and Lake Pontchartrain, had put up a few wretched huts, and was now using every effort to have the government of the whole province domiciled in his future capital, and was earnestly opposing the policy of the European directors of the Company of the West, who were shortsightedly determined to establish the capital at Biloxi or Mobile, or on the Bay of St. Bernard. This Bienville had inherited the legacy of Lasalle, Iberville, and those other earlier explorers of the Mississippi Valley, — a legacy of dreams, of fiery imagination, of plans that stretched infinitely into the golden haze of the future. In the vision of these men, there had been always foreshadowed the figure of a city which should dominate this enormous valley of fertility and richness, — a city lying near the mouth of the great river which, with its countless branches, drained and enriched and opened this vast treasure store of Nature; and, consequently, as New Orleans is one of the few cities of this country with a past, so, likewise, it has always been the city of the future, — a city of vast possibilities in the plans of Lasalle, of Iberville, of Bienville, of France, and then of Spain, of Aaron Burr, of Napoleon, of Thomas Jefferson and the United States.

To the vivid imagination of the first Frenchmen who explored the valley, this vast territory appealed irresistibly as a land of limitless possibilities. What a field for the imagination of an artist like Lasalle to work upon ! Vast forests to be explored and threaded with highways ; fields and mines to be worked for the treasures which Nature had but half hidden in them ; the great province of Canada to be welded to the greater province of Louisiana by the possession of the Mississippi; the building of an immense chain of forts from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico, strengthening the hold of France, and slowly pushing both Spaniard and Englishman out of North America, — all this untraversed wilderness, like a fresh canvas, on which to build the richest empire of the earth. Lasalle felt that the Mississippi would be the key to this whole region, and that Nature herself seemed to destine that there should one day be a city near its mouth, as the natural gateway of the valley,— a city which at some time would become one of the great and the rich of the earth. The little piece of higher ground, lying so providentially between the river and the lakes which lead out to the Gulf, attracted his eye, and it was part of his astounding plan to found a city somewhere in this neighborhood. This was the legacy of Lasalle ; and to this legacy Bienville boldly laid claim when, in 1718, he marked out his town on the “ Island ” of Orleans, and firmly insisted, against the cautious policy of the Company, upon making his little collection of huts the capital of the province of Louisiana.

It was small wonder that many of the directors of the Company held back in doubt. Indeed, it is strange that fresh colonists came so eagerly, unless even the common settlers were somehow fired by contagion with that inexhaustible and romantic imagination of Bienville. The city — still half imaginary in a doubtful future, and half in sordid actual existence — was poor enough as Le Page du Pratz saw it. A few wretched huts, thatched with latanier, huddled near the river, and about a league and a half back toward the lake, on Bayou St. Jean, were a few more. On all sides, for many a desert mile, lay the vast sombre gloom of the impenetrable, mysterious swamp, weighing upon the spirit with all its vast solitude and sinister menace of lurking pestilence, casting the dull shadows of its gray moss-choked trees into the very souls of the few white men alone in this measureless wilderness. But in the midst of this pitiful reality the dream of Lasalle lived in the mind of Bienville. Many other colonists came, as Le Page du Pratz had done, and made little ephemeral huts of wood and latanier thatch, near which no fire might be built with prudence ; and doubtless many another besides the worthy chronicler bought an Indian slave girl and established a modest ménage. At any rate, the colony grew; not always by such simple means, unfortunately, but sometimes in ways which have passed into story, and thrill us to-day with pity and horror.

Nevertheless, by some new influence in this fresh land, where there was no past, no tradition, no class, no convention, but all free future, the sometimes foul methods of peopling the colony seemed to be purged of the evil effects which might have been expected ; and when, a few years later, the capital of the province was at last triumphantly established in Bienville’s city, progress began in earnest. The town was laid out in squares, within the small space now bounded by Canal, Esplanade, Old Levee, and Rampart streets; a small levee was erected, and ditches were dug along the streets to drain the water back into the swamps; for the town suffered from the annual overflow of the river, and the raised squares of the inhabited portion stood out like little islands, giving themselves the name islets, which is still the local Creolism. Grants of land were made in the neighboring country, and the province was soon growing rice, indigo, and tobacco ; the fig was introduced from Provence and the orange from Hispaniola, and soon a flourishing commerce sprang up.

The rule of the Spaniard was in most respects wise, and the city grew steadily in importance. During the early years of the new United States the Spanish government at New Orleans was a source of threatening danger, at one time almost drawing under its control the growing territory of Kentucky. Napoleon, too, after he had gained possession of Louisiana, meditated a vast scheme of dominion in the West, wherein New Orleans figured as capital city. Meanwhile, the power of the United States had been spreading steadily westward, and the possession of the Mississippi, and of New Orleans, its great port, had become a necessity loudly demanded by the whole country, not only as a means of freeing itself from the old dread of whichever foreign power held this position of advantage, but still more as an outlet for its expanding commerce. Therefore, when Napoleon was compelled, by a turn of events, to sell the whole province to Jefferson, the act of purchase marked the victory of that great force of commercial necessity which, from the earliest times, has slowly but inevitably and irresistibly worked toward the control of the destiny of New Orleans.

To be sure, the transfer was attended with inconveniences and with some hardships ; but after the first years of bitter discontent, of another reconstruction under alien laws and governors, harder for the people of the city than the rule of the Spaniard had been ; after unjust and suspicious treatment and neglect at the hands of the national government; and after the glorious trial by blood and battle in the War of 1812, New Orleans began to take her own high place among the cities of the country, and entered upon the brightest and most prosperous period of her history. The population of the city at the time of the cession to the United States had been about 8056 ; between that time and 1815 the number had increased to almost 33,000 ; and in 1840 the population reached 100,000, making New Orleans the largest city in the country, after New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. Before the steamboat trade began, hundreds of flatboats came down the river, and the city swarmed with bargemen, — a rough, disorderly class, which, by its boorishness of manner, lack of culture, and keen scent for a bargain, gave an evil savor to the name “American; ” so that to this day many old-fashioned residents of the old quarter still look upon the Anglo-Saxon as a semi-barbarian, without polish or the finer instincts of intellect or art, and one still hears, occasionally, the negro expression Méricains coquins. Indeed, it was a life-and-death struggle between the two forces which have since moulded the city into its present personality, — the older spirit of isolated and proud conservatism, holding to the traditions and tastes brought from Europe, and the new spirit of commercial progress and practical, money - making, tradepushing Americanism. Each modified the other, and in the years which followed the cession the two quarters gradually coalesced in certain ways ; so that the city grew marvelously in commercial importance and population, rapidly absorbing the lucrative trade of the Mississippi Valley, and becoming, as Jefferson had predicted, one of the great ports of the world, and yet it lost none of the peculiar personality which had been the result of its isolated and independent growth. In fact, as wealth increased, the city became more and more noted for the culture which was represented by its upper classes, unique in America, European in taste. Nowhere else in America were such private libraries or such pictures, or silver, statuary, and furniture, and nowhere else in America were such things so heartily appreciated ; for the cultivation of the city was of longer and more spontaneous growth, and less like the first awkward efforts of a pupil trying to do graceful things with heavy, untrained fingers, than was the case in nearly all other parts of the United States. Visitors from Europe who found welcome in the elegant homes of the city breathed here a more congenial atmosphere than any other this side of the Atlantic. All this has been much bewritten, — this period of wealth and prosperity and the leisure which breeds refinement and social, artistic, and intellectual development. Again New Orleans seemed on the point of realizing the dreams of her founders and of those who had coveted possession of her ; but then came “ the war,” as we must always say in the South, when we try to explain why the present is not what the past promised.

When the Civil War broke out, Louisiana went into the new Confederacy with much regret, as did all the better part of the South, — regret of the days of former unity, and sorrow to take up the sword which the instinct of honor and self-preservation seemed to force into her hand.

New Orleans, however, did her part, and sent her best to the distant war, leaving herself unprotected, and in the hour of need found herself deserted and helpless. When the Federal fleet drew up before the city, in 1862, resistance was impossible. There were no troops, no fortifications. There was not even a military officer to surrender the place. So, without surrender and without resistance, this most important city of the vast valley of the Mississippi fell into the hands of the enemy; and on the 1st of May, 1862, after all disagreeable and dangerous preliminaries had been arranged by Farragut and the naval force, General Benjamin F. Butler set foot upon the streets of New Orleans. From that day dates the weary period of oppression, robbery, and ruin which marred for so long the future of the city, and left scars upon the public character which will remain for generations. The rule of the Spaniard had been strict, and the hand of O’Reilly had fallen heavily upon New Orleans, but a wise policy and endeavor for the public welfare had soon reconciled the people. Had Butler shown either forbearance or wisdom, or if, though pursuing a course of firm military domination, he had shown common justice and personal bravery or decency, the long period of riot and anarchy, bitterness and ruin, might have been averted, and the reconstruction of Louisiana might have been a comparatively simple matter; but Butler succeeded only in casting odium upon the government whose policy he was supposed to be carrying out, and setting farther off the day of reconciliation. This is not the place to enter into a discussion of his motives or his policy. It is enough merely to state that the protest which his administration aroused grew so universal that he was recalled, after seven months of abuse, and General Banks was sent in his place.

A large part of the state was in possession of the Confederates, and no attempt was made to organize a state government until 1864. In that year a socalled Constitutional Convention of delegates from the parts of the state lying within the Union lines was held, a constitution was adopted, the Confederate debt was repudiated, slavery was formally declared to be forever abolished, and a new government was chosen. After the war had been ended, many of the old leaders of the South began to regain their influence in politics; and as this condition of affairs was not at all to the taste of the hungry swarm of carpetbaggers who followed in the path which the victorious army had opened, the Radical party which controlled Congress began to take active measures of retaliation.

The negro was made the excuse for the course which was followed. The condition of the freedman at this time was indeed pitiable. Under the institution of slavery, he had developed from a state of the lowest savagery to a condition of partial civilization ; but this development had been due to wholly abnormal conditions, and had not been at all analogous to the slow process and weeding-out struggle through which the white races had toiled upward for thousands of years. If the negro had been forced to compete for existence in America, he would have been crushed out by the civilized power, as the Indian has been. The peculiar institution of slavery, however, protected him not only from this competition, but also, by artificial means, from those great forces of Nature which inevitably weed out the weaker organisms, and which operate most unrestrainedly upon the ignorant savage. For the first time, perhaps, in the history of the world, human beings had been bred and regulated like valuable stock, with as much care as is put upon the best horses and cattle. As a natural consequence, the sanitary condition of the negro during slavery was remarkable (especially by contrast with his present condition), and his growth was the abnormal growth of a plant abnormally raised in a hothouse. When, therefore, this mass of helpless beings was thrown upon its own resources by the act of emancipation, and when the protection of slavery had been withdrawn, the direst wretchedness and suffering followed. In 1865 the Freedmen’s Bureau was created, but it was powerless to cope with the situation. Congress then committed the fatal mistake of imagining that suffrage would work out a solution. Accordingly, the Representatives of the Southern states were refused their seats until their states had ratified the Fourteenth Amendment to the national Constitution.

In Louisiana, the Radical Republicans made an illegal attempt in this direction. The convention of 1864 had decided that amendments to the state constitution should be proposed in the legislature, and then submitted, after approval by that body, to a general election. The legislature had adjourned in March, 1866, without taking any such action ; but, after its adjournment, certain members of the old convention of 1864 set on foot a movement to call another meeting of the same body which had then met. The former president of this convention refused to issue the call, whereupon the minority (about forty members out of ninety-six) assembled in New Orleans on June 26, and elected a president pro tempore, who called a meeting for a “ Constitutional Convention ” to be held on July 30. The openly avowed object of these Radicals was the enfranchisement of negroes and the withholding of suffrage from the majority of the whites, hoping thereby to control the government. The negroes were appealed to in mass meetings, and much inflammatory talk was indulged in. Finally, the convention, swelled in numbers by a yelling crowd of negro supporters, met in the hall of the Mechanics’ Institute. The citizens, who had been worn out by the course of Butler and his successors, were exasperated to impatience by these proceedings. A large mob attacked the building where the convention was being held, overpowered the scared lawmakers and their negro supporters, — though most of these were armed, — and killed or wounded more or less seriously a large number of them there and in the street. A congressional committee of three investigated the trouble. Their report makes interesting reading. This investigation, however, judging from the testimony elicited, the questions put, and the class of witnesses called, was unfair and prejudiced ; and notwithstanding the strong protest of the minority, the report of the majority, recommending strict military government and thorough reconstruction of Louisiana, was approved. In 1867, consequently, Louisiana was put under military rule. The district commander was directed to enroll the citizens, enforcing the test oath, excluding ex-Confederates, and admitting negroes to ballot, and to call a general election of voters so chosen to select delegates to a convention which should revise the constitution of the state, in conformity with the sentiment of Congress. Registration boards were appointed, and delegates were elected by a combined vote of white and black radicals. The convention so elected duly ratified the Fourteenth Amendment, granting the curse of suffrage to the negro; and in 1868 Louisiana seated her Representatives in Congress. The government so elected was maintained by the power of United States troops, in the face of all opposition on the part of the disfranchised majority of the people, and regardless of the shameless system of robbery and political knavery which was practiced upon the helpless state.

In 1872, however, the Amnesty Act restored suffrage to many ex-Confederates. A party of Liberal Republicans separated from the Radical party, joining with those Democrats who had been enfranchised ; and this split in the dominating party weakened its power. The final separation occurred during the session of the legislature in January, 1872. Warmoth was governor. On the death of Dunn, the lieutenant governor, in the November previous, Pinchback, a colored supporter of Warmoth, had been elected president of the Senate. Question was made of the legality of his election. In the House, Speaker Carter, an anti-Warmoth man, was antagonized by the governor’s friends. After a bitter struggle, during which Warmoth and some of his supporters were arrested by the Federal authorities, Carter was deposed. An investigating committee was sent down by Congress. During the broil Warmoth and Pinchback became separated. Warmoth, heading the Liberal Republicans, fused with the Democrats in a reform ticket which named John McEnery for governor, with an electoral ticket supporting Greeley and Brown. The Pinchback faction of Radical Republicans supported the Grant ticket, and nominated Kellogg for governor and Pinchback for Congressman at large. The election of November, 1872, was disputed. There were two Returning Boards, each declaring its candidate elected by a good majority. Each party made up its own lists of Representatives, which differed considerably. The new legislature met on the 7th of January, 1873, under the surveillance of United States troops. A week later both governors took the oath of office. President Grant favored the Pinchback faction, and supported it with Federal troops ; and the congressional committee which had been instructed to investigate the dispute found that, while McEnery and his party were entitled to the government de jure, the Kellogg party, supported by the army, was the government de facto. They recommended the passage of a law insuring honest elections ; but the suggestion was not adopted, and practical anarchy ensued.

Though Grant supported Kellogg, the McEnery government still retained its organization. Disputes and fights, naturally, were common, and soon the active portion of the city organized into a White League, a body armed and ready for decisive action. Kellogg maintained his power by the protection of the Federal troops (who by this time were heartily sick of shielding the carpet-baggers) and with the assistance of the Metropolitan Police, a body of militia, mostly negroes, directly under his orders.

Matters reached a bloody crisis, when, on the 14th of September, 1874, a mass meeting of citizens appointed a committee to wait upon Kellogg and ask him to abdicate. The governor had fled to the protection of the United States troops in the Custom House, which was called among the White Leaguers the " House of Refuge.” Kellogg, from his safe quarters, declined to negotiate, and the leaders of the people advised their followers to go home and get their arms. In the afternoon, the White League under General Ogden completely routed the Metropolitan Police under General Longstreet, who subsequently joined Kellogg in the House of Refuge. No acts of violence were committed against negroes or non-combatants, although the officials of the McEnery ticket were installed all over the state. The day after the fight, a mass of citizens escorted Lieutenant Governor Penn to the State House in triumph, and when the White League passed the Custom House the United States troops gave them the heartiest cheers. President Grant, however, exerted his power, and drew Kellogg from his retreat to resume his duties as governor. Some of the McEnery party remained in office, but merely because certain members of the Kellogg party had fled and could not be found. The Metropolitan Police had been completely demoralized, and were of no further service.

The final change was coming. The whole mass of the people was now thoroughly disgusted with the methods of the carpet-baggers; for white citizens who were legally entitled to vote had been arbitrarily prevented from registering, and the more intelligent and better class of negroes had begun to see that the Radical Republicans were not their friends, and that only those negroes who could be used as mere tools obtained offices. It seemed likely that the election of November, 1874, would go to the Democrats ; but when the Returning Board completed its labors, it was found that the Republicans had the treasury and a majority of two in the legislature, five seats being left open. These changes in returns were made on the ground of intimidation at election, — in some cases even when no complaint had been made to them. A congressional committee, composed of two Republicans and one Democrat, examined the work of the Returning Board, and unanimously reported that its action had been, “ on the whole, arbitrary, unjust, and illegal; and that this arbitrary, unjust, and illegal action alone prevented the return of a majority of Conservative members to the Lower House.” No action was taken upon this report, and trouble gathered again. A few days before the assembling of the legislature one of the Republican members was arrested for embezzlement, and his party claimed that this had been done for political purposes. The threatening aspect of affairs caused President Grant to put General Philip Sheridan in command of the department.

On the 4th of January, 1875, the House convened. Of what happened then there are several accounts ; the following is substantially from the report of the subsequent Congressional Investigating Committee. The State House was surrounded by Federal troops, and no one was permitted to enter save by Kellogg’s orders. At noon order was called by Vigers, clerk of the former House. The roll call was answered by fifty Democrats and fifty-two Republicans.

A Conservative member, Mr. Billieu, nominated L. A. Wiltz as temporary chairman. The clerk made some objection, but Mr. Billieu quickly put the motion, and declared it carried by a viva voce vote. Wiltz sprang to the platform, pushed the clerk aside, and seized the gavel. The members were then sworn in. In some way, a new clerk and sergeant-at-arms were elected ; then, from some gentlemen who had managed to secure admittance, several additional sergeants-at-arms were appointed. Protests, points of order, confused calls for yeas and nays, were overriden. It was a case of fighting the devil with fire, and so the five contesting Democrats were admitted and sworn in. The Republicans, in the confusion, nominated Lowell for chairman, and declared him elected ; but he declined to attempt to take his seat, and Wiltz was elected Speaker of the House. Several of the Republicans now attempted to leave, but were prevented by the sergeants-at-arms. Pistols were drawn, and the troops were called in to restore order. The election of minor officers went on, until finally Kellogg ordered the Federal officer to remove the five members who had just been sworn in, but who had not been returned by the Returning Board. This was done, and Wiltz and the Conservatives left the hall. The Republicans remained and organized, electing Hahn Speaker.

In reporting this affair, General Sheridan characterized the people of the city as “ banditti,” and advised violent and crushing methods. On the other hand, all the exchanges, and a long list of Northern resident merchants and clergymen, passed resolutions denying the justice of Sheridan’s report; and the public press at the North added its protest in favor of downtrodden Louisiana. Under a resolution introduced in the Senate, Mr. Thurman called upon President Grant for an explanation. The President’s message in reply was weak and unsatisfactory. Before long, however, a congressional committee effected what is known as the “ Wheeler adjustment,” whereby the Kellogg government was allowed to remain; but twelve contesting members of the legislature, elected by the people, and excluded by the Returning Board, were seated. Wiltz and Hahn withdrew their claims, and a Conservative member was elected Speaker of the House.

In the presidential campaign of 1876, Louisiana gave her popular vote for Tilden against Hayes ; but the Returning Board had given the state to Hayes, on the old charge of fraud and intimidation. Kellogg had signed the returns in favor of the Hayes electors ; and McEnery, who still insisted that he was governor, signed for Tilden. The Electoral Commission, in January, 1877, by a strict party vote, decided to abide by the decisions of the Returning Boards in the contested states, and gave the election to Hayes. In the state election, General F. T. Nichols, a Democrat and veteran of the Confederate army, ran against Packard for governor, and was elected. During Nichols’s term President Hayes withdrew the Federal troops, and the reign of the carpet-bagger was over.

Such is the bare, dispassionate outline of the political history of the city during these wretched years ; but a far more terrible story is told by the condition of the impoverished people. The wealth of the city had made it a special prize for the horde of adventurers, politicians, and fanatics, white and black, who preyed upon their prostrate victim under the protection of a misguided and vindictive national government. After the ruthless harvest of Butler and his fellows, there had followed a swarm of gleaners through long years of riot, oppression, confiscation, and robbery. It has been calculated that during the ten years preceding 1876 New Orleans paid in direct taxes more than the estimate value of all the property within her limits during that year ; and yet the state debt was larger by $40,000,000 than it had been before the carpet-bag rule, notwithstanding the fact that all debts contracted by the state while under the Confederate government had been repudiated by the so-called Constitutional Convention of 1864. Business had been broken up, commerce was stagnant, whole families had been impoverished. Work — work of all kinds — had to be sought, even by many of the women ; and that, too, in a city where business activity had been almost killed. Anything was laid hold of. The young generation of many an old house was glad to drive street cars, or snip cloth at a dry-goods counter. Even this is not the worst that is told in the unwritten tales of the people. This is the story of the strong, but the weaker went to the wall, as always; and some day, when the novelist of the city shall come, he shall find in the whispered stories of these days themes as powerful, significant, pathetic, and tragic as the themes of Tolstoi, Stepniak, and Sienkiewicz.

In course of time, however, the government and commerce of the city assumed more normal conditions. The power was slowly absorbed again by the people and their chosen leaders. By all the means, fair or foul, which a people struggling desperately for self-preservation will use, the influence of the negro and the local Republican was nullified ; and though the methods chosen have had an evil influence upon the politics of the state, the government of the state and the city to-day is as much an expression of the will of the people as it is anywhere in the United States.

New Orleans of to-day is of two parts, and nourishes a twofold life, — just as the shaping force of its destiny has been twofold, — from within and from without.

The old quarter of the city is Latin. By long isolation this Latin city developed its peculiarities, growing slowly and inwardly, so to speak, living out the European life from which it had sprung. The narrow stone-paved streets, picturesque whether washed with gray rain or yellow sunshine ; the decaying houses of the past, with their wrought-iron balconies, closed heavy shutters, jealous gates, and alleys opening into flowery hidden courtyards ; the stuccoed walls and redtiled roofs of the humbler dwellings squatting beside the banquettes ; the Place d’Armes, with the Spanish cathedral and Cabildo; the many-tongued and many-hued French market; the very people, with their Latin faces and Latin speech and Latin faculty of making their habitations picturesque in some peculiar way, whether in elegance and refinement or in squalor and dirt, — all, the whole quarter, is quaint and foreign to the American visitor, and has that sense of silent gossip which one gets from the streets and houses of Balzac’s stories, a certain personality in the expression of the very brick, stone, and iron, and an indefinable connection between these houses and streets and the quaintly individualized characters whom one sees at every turn. In fact, there is only one way to describe the impression exactly: to live in this quarter, to know its houses, its streets, its people, its stories, is like reading Balzac. Only the obvious externals, however, can be put into word descriptions which a stranger would understand. It requires long acquaintance to know Zizi, for example, that milatresse who is coming out of the cathedral yonder with her basket, having been to the French market and to early mass, and who will, later on (as the day is Sunday), go to the matinée at the French Opera to hear Faust or Le Trouvère au quatrième, with somebody’s diningroom boy or coachman, — some goodfeatured mulatto, who is as likely to be named Raoul de Navarre as Bobo or Popol. Even a Frenchman would not understand their negro patois, which has attained the dignity of a distinct dialect. And if some friend should take you through one of those alleyways which open into Royal Street, and lead you back to the palm-crowded courtyard, and up the curved stairway with its thin carved banisters and the quaint arched windows at the landings, you would feel how much harder it is to know the lady who welcomes you so courteously up there in a cool, darkened room, filled with relics of old furniture and bricabrac, and who pours you some cordial, made by an ancient family recipe, into one of the small crystal glasses spared by “ Butler’s Yankees.” The stranger finds it hard to understand this life, which seems to draw its present existence from the past and from those immediate surroundings which are in fact visible heredity. The great mahogany case of books which grandpère brought from Paris, Ovid, Horace, Molière, Corneille, Racine, Bernard, classic Latin and classic or old-fashioned French, things for which the great “reading public ” of America has no time, all elegantly and permanently bound, as books are not bound in these days of hasty literature, — all speak of another world, a different set of ideals and beliefs and conventions and prejudices from those which pass current as American.

On the other hand, above Canal Street all is different, again. Here is the newer quarter, settled by the “Americans” who came into the city after the cession to the United States. It is not in the residence portion of this quarter that one will find anything peculiar or interesting, — except, always, the flowers and the trees. Among the dwellings of the middle and lower classes of this American part of the town, one sees little but cheap, hasty buildings, and commonplace, colorless, deadening ugliness ; and on the wider avenues (except the older ones), even where the display of wealth is most evident, there is sometimes an offensive air of newness, incongruity, or striving after effect, which is saved from the uninspiring appearance of the smart avenues of most American cities only by the redeeming grace of flowers, lawns, and trees. Along the river front and in the business portion of the city, however, one really sees what the American influence has done for New Orleans, — the great outer force which has been slowly shaping the destiny of the city to its own ends. By its tastes, as it were, New Orleans is not commercial as Chicago and New York are commercial; but in tracing the history of the place, and noting especially the struggle of the United States for its possession, one sees clearly how a life of commerce has been forced upon it by its geographical position and by the development of the vast and rich valley of the Mississippi.

Only since the Civil War have the South and West begun to develop their inexhaustible and untried natural resources. They are destined to become the producing portion of the country, and the richest. The central position of New Orleans in this wide region, and its extraordinary facilities for shipping, lying as it does between East and West and at the mouth of the great system of rivers which drain the Mississippi Valley, seem to single it out to be the great port of this portion of the country, perhaps the greatest port of the whole country. The railroads, confident of the future of the city, are improving their terminals and adding large grain elevators. The city is now exporting more grain, cotton, and other goods than ever before in its history. Being favorably and centrally located in relation alike to Texas, the West, the Upper Mississippi Valley, Kentucky, Alabama, Cuba and the West Indies, and the territory which will be made more accessible by an Isthmian Canal, New Orleans is equally fitted to handle most easily all the trade between these points, and itself to manufacture the raw products imported from them.

A better harbor and greater extent of wharfing could not be found in the world ; but this gift of Nature to New Orleans has never been, as yet, worked to its full advantage, on account of the shallow depth of the channels through the bars at the mouths of the river. About the year 1721, Bienville’s engineer, Panger, suggested that, as the river constantly deposited sediment and made land at the time of annual overflow, drift logs could be directed to lie in such a way as to form rough, permeable dikes along the bank of one of the channels running out into the Gulf, and the logs fixed by sinking old vessels, allowing the sediment to fill up the interstices; thereby increasing the depth of the bed as the force of the current was increased by narrowing the channel. The jetties which Captain Eads placed in South Pass somewhat over twenty-five years ago have given a depth of sixteen or seventeen feet to twenty-six or thirty feet in that channel, and the number of arrivals of ocean steamers in the port of New Orleans has been more than doubled ; but it is now of the highest importance to the whole Mississippi Valley that one of the mouths of the river should be deepened, so as to allow the largest vessels to cross the bar with ease. It is strange that the national government has not yet taken full advantage of the unusually favorable position of New Orleans, to increase its usefulness as a port for all the vast and rich area of which it is the natural commercial gateway.

Since the destruction of the old civilization which flourished so luxuriantly in New Orleans before the Civil War, the unfortunate city has been too much occupied by its desperate struggle for bare existence and for freedom from the black incubus to fulfill the promise which the culture and elegant wealth of those days seemed to assure. What wealth remained with us has changed hands, and the old aristocracy has gone, in one sense, out of prominence. The books, the pictures, the statuary, the handsome and refined furniture of that day, have mostly flown away to the North, either during the carnival of Butler and the carpet-baggers who came gleaning after him, or in the resulting poverty upon which the pawnbroker preyed; and so to-day, although the second-hand shops are a paradise for the casual collector, New Orleans is in no sense an art centre, not even of imported art, as is the case of New York; and absence of imported art in America means that there is little or no art of any kind worthy of the name. As a city of gayety and pleasure, in spite of her myriad sorrows, New Orleans is known above all her sister cities. Perhaps it is the dash of warm Latin blood that allows her to abandon herself to pleasure without a thought of commercial gain, or of anything but the mere enjoyment of the present. If, however, New Orleans is ever to fulfill that dream of her founders which saw her mistress of the richest portion of the continent, if New Orleans is ever to be the great world-city which Nature seemed to design she should be, it will be through using her one supreme advantage of position, as Lasalle and Bienville saw, and by means of that vast civilizing growth whose roots are in human need and whose fruits are the power of great nations, that warfare of times of peace, — commerce.

Albert Phelps.